Planters'
Insatiable Appetite for Slave Labour
CO 318/160, no. 1502

To the Right Honorable Lord Stanley
Her Majesty's Principal Secretary of State for the Colonies.

The Memorial of the Associated Body
of West Indian Planters and Merchants of
Liverpool.

Respectfully Sheweth.

That your Memorialists desire
to call your Lordships most serious attention to the distressed
condition of the West Indian Colonies where many Estates have
been entirely thrown out of cultivation, and almost all the
Land has been cultivated without remuneration if not to a positive
loss since the cessation of Apprenticeship owing to the want
of continuous and steady labor.

That even in the Island of Antigua
where the population is very abundant and the difficulty of
obtaining a livelihood consequently greater than in most of
the other Colonies; and where it was at first believed that
labor could be obtained sufficient for the profitable cultivation
of the Soil, the want of continuous labor is now loudly complained
of.

The declining state of the West
Indies has been repeatedly brought under the notice of Her Majestys
Government, without any effectual relief having been afforded
to their necessities.

Their present distress having
been caused, not by any negligence or imprudence of the West
Indians themselves, but by a deliberate Act of the Imperial
Parliament, your Memorialists conceive that they have a just
claim upon Her Majestys Government for the employment of the
most energetic and comprehensive measures of relief that can
be afforded, without injury to the interests of other parties,
and your Memorialists appeal with confidence to your Lordship
and the other Members of the Cabinet, because the consequences
of the Emancipation as regarded the prosperity of the West Indies
were distinctly foretold during the debates in Parliament on
the Bill, by

1st. His Grace the Duke of Wellington
who, having presented a Petition praying to be heard by Counsel
against the Bill, which Prayer was refused, protested against
the passing of the Bill, to which Protest your Memorialists
respectfully crave permission to refer.

2ndly. by Sir Robert Peel who in his
speech on the Bill observed "In the West Indies after you
abolish the necessity of labour from coercion, you cannot substitute
the stimulus to labour from the necessity of procuring subsistence:
The labour of a few days is all that is necessary in those countries
to procure, not merely the articles of subsistence, but also
the articles of luxury. The evidence is conclusive, that so
fertile is the Land in most of the West Indian Islands that
a Slave by a very small .....